Linux Antivirus

[kirennia]

Well I have recently installed linux as a second boot partition so I can do some work on it but I'm still unconvinced of which anti virus program to use for it and as such, am stuck with windows for the most part until I sort it out.

There are less then 100 documented linux viruses (so I've read) but the problem is more that any windows virus could get on my machine and not manifest until I pass it onto a windows user which I basically, don't want to be responsible for.

Anyone here use linux at home/work and wish to tell me whats what about the protection side of it? Some people I've spoken to thus far say that it's fine to just not use anti virus on my computer but in all honesty, after doing a network security module, I'm all but convinced it'd be okay to leave myself open.

[GReaper]

You don't really need an anti-virus package for a Linux distribution, the problems they get are a little bit different. You don't really go downloading for random .exe files to use in Linux so you're unlikely to get infected.

The basics for security would be:

- Stay updated, your distribution should have some update tool which can fix any packages with security problems.
- Avoid packages from unknown sources. Chances are your chosen distribution has thousands of applications to choose from anyway.
- Don't run anything as root unless you need to. If you don't run as an admin user (root) then any malicious application can't write to important parts of the filesystem, unlike most versions of Windows which seem happy with admin by default users.
- Make sure you've got a firewall enabled, unless you're running a server then you really don't need open ports.

[GReaper]

Also I'd say that most of the anti-virus packages which run under Linux run the same database packages as they do for other versions. Sometimes it can be useful to virus scan incoming email or have a single anti-virus solution on a network storage server.

[kirennia]

Cheers bud, I've got AVG anyway even though it wont update without root privileges which I need to sort out at some point.

New problem at the moment is that I'm trying to sort out linux to read from NTFS disk partitions so I can read my music and other programs/games from my windows partition. While I realise it isn't an ideal situation and that some/most of the programs wont work, I'm doing it as a sort of test for personal peace of mind. There are programs such as paragon out there but I'd like to find a freeware program which does a similar/the same job.

I'm basically trying to see just how viable it is at the moment to run a pure linux machine for the everyday user and want to understand more about how it works. Cheers for the help so far, repped etc

[GReaper]

Reading NTFS shouldn't be a problem for most distributions, read support has been available for years. NTFS write support has been a bit patchy in the past but NTFS-3G and ntfsmount should allow decent read/write access. Both drivers should be available in most recent distributions.

You'll probably find it viable to run as a desktop as quite a few great apps run on multiple platforms these days (Firefox/Thunderbird/OpenOffice.org, etc). The only problem for me has always been the games, Wine is a good effort but it can't reliably keep up with every possible game.